Fight for the Future: Repurposing Contact Email Addresses
Fight for the Future, a newly-formed nonprofit group that opposes the SOPA and PIPA antipiracy legislation currently under consideration in the U.S. Congress and that runs the sopastrike.com web site, is sending bulk email to email addresses that were entered into that web site as contact email addresses in case there was a problem with the user’s blacked-out web site or some other technical issue. The bulk email makes no claim to opt-in, although it offers an opt-out link. The ESP is Blue State Digital.
The MainSleaze Spam blog participated in yesterday’s strike against SOPA. I signed up on the SOPA Strike web site to add the blog and my other web sites to the list, and provided my email address so that in event of any issues I could be contacted. Nowhere during the signup process was I asked for, or did I give, permission for my email address to be placed on a bulk email list. Nowhere was there any *indication* that the email address would be used for anything but contacting me personally and directly.
Now, had I been asked, I probably would have signed up for a mailing list to coordinate ongoing efforts against SOPA and PIPA, although using a different email address. (I don’t send list email to role email addresses, and mainsleaze@spambouncer.org is the role address for this blog.) The SOPA and PIPA legislation is in my opinion dangerous: a poorly-conceived and poorly-implemented effort to fight internet copyright violations and piracy that epitomizes the problem of legislative overreach. (You don’t burn your house down to get rid of a cockroach infestation.) However, a good cause is not an excuse for spamming people, and sending bulk email to email addresses that were not given to you for that purpose is spamming. In this case, I know exactly what process was followed to obtain this email address, and it did not meet the minimum standards for opt-in.
The following headers are completely unredacted on purpose.
Sending IP: 70.42.50.132
Spam Sample:
Actual Headers:
Received: from mta-inap8.bluestatedigital.com (mta-inap8.bluestatedigital.com [70.42.50.132])
by pinochet.ergosphere.net (Postfix) with ESMTP id 94F0D648085
for <mainsleaze@spambouncer.org>; Thu, 19 Jan 2012 00:33:11 -0600 (CST)
Received: by mta-inap8.bluestatedigital.com (Postfix, from userid 508)
id 84954920CCCD5; Thu, 19 Jan 2012 01:33:10 -0500 (EST)
DKIM-Signature: v=1; a=rsa-sha256; c=relaxed/relaxed;
d=bounce.bluestatedigital.com; s=bsdkey; t=1326954790;
bh=60EZHTaM56I1DkOBFr2e4ZKWwaRP1A6q8XSu4p5BVGU=;
h=Date:To:From:Reply-to:Subject:Message-ID:List-Unsubscribe:
MIME-Version:Content-Type;
b=DaWBk34qRH1fnse4y2KlJBrisy/7i+B5+QHPm5Hw7STolS96peuimOvVbJX+sr7qr
YWk5MAb3KMZ49uhBPAcTZlWMaxMHSP+Ola7X3S8eJ79OnwgcscRgekN22Q1XZofEQU
jxRxER/2w1eWri1QkRUHfFpzapUR2wF5viH5I8+o=
Received: from maillist-b
by bounce.bluestatedigital.com with local (PHPMailer);
Thu, 19 Jan 2012 06:33:10 +0000
Date: Thu, 19 Jan 2012 06:33:10 +0000
To: Catherine Jefferson <mainsleaze@spambouncer.org>
From: Fight For The Future <info@fightforthefuture.org>
Reply-to: info@fightforthefuture.org
Subject: Unreal
Message-ID: <17d8433e137c7da44c2949da16ba50fd@bounce.bluestatedigital.com>
X-Priority: 3
X-Mailer: PHPMailer [version 1.71-blue_mailer]
X-maillist-id: 67f64be995a30fd3
X-maillist-guid: BgNGVhRtUAMDBQRXVFwKVAIKAFRQBA
List-Unsubscribe: <http://act.fightforthefuture.org/unsubscribe?email=mainsleaze@spambouncer.org>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: multipart/alternative;
boundary="b1_17d8433e137c7da44c2949da16ba50fd"
Readable Email:
From: Fight For The Future <info@fightforthefuture.org>
To: <spamtrap>
Subject: Unreal
Reply-To: info@fightforthefuture.org
The internet blackout was nuts, right?
Google launched a petition. Wikipedia voted to shut itself off. Senators’ websites went down just from the sheer surge of voters trying to write them. NYC and SF geeks had protests that packed city blocks.
You made history today: nothing like this has ever happened before. Tech companies and users teamed up. The tens of millions of people who make the internet what it is joined together to defend its inherent openness. The network defended itself. Whatever you call it, the bottom line is clear: from today forward, it will be much harder to mess up the internet.
The really crazy part? We might even win. Approaching Monday’s crucial Senate vote there are now 35 Senators publicly opposing PIPA. Last week there were 5. And it just takes just 41 solid “no” votes to permanently stall PIPA (and SOPA) in the Senate. What seemed like miles away a few weeks ago is now within reach.
<removed>
This email was sent to mainsleaze@spambouncer.org.
To unsubscribe, go to:
http://act.fightforthefuture.org/unsubscribe
Hi Catherine, it’s Holmes here from Fight for the Future.
I just saw this post while searching for your recent one. I missed it in our Twitter back in January and I really, really wish I hadn’t. Thank you so much for participating in the SOPA blackout/strike. And I’m so sorry you felt burned.
We thought that the page did enough to disclose to everyone who signed up that we would contact them. A line immediately below the signup form said this:
I just double checked to make sure, and found this screenshot from the days of the blackout with a google search. We were actively tweaking the site in those days, so it’s possible the language and layout was slightly different at different points. But we have been very careful to always include a clear disclosure. Everyone was expecting a protracted fight in Congress, and we were organizing people to meet their Senators in threads like these. Being able to contact people was essential, and we did our best to make that clear.
That said, there was an insane mistake in migration from Blue State Digital to Action Kit that led us to email you *after* you unsubscribed, along with *every one* of our unsubscribed users, and that was totally unacceptable. It makes me sick that it happened. We are terribly, terribly sorry.
Worse, at some point, some person, group, or bot submitted a large number of harvested emails to our list. We don’t know why, or who, but now confirmed opt-in seems like the only option going forward.
I know most people reading this don’t consider it acceptable to email without a confirmation email. From our point of view, we were carefully following a set of practices used by other respected grassroots political groups, presidential campaigns, etc, and following the advice of the same service providers (like Actionkit and Bluestate). But at this point we don’t need convincing. If there’s somebody out there submitting harvested emails to our list, we can’t let that happen, so we’ll need to confirm users’ emails.
We’ve just put up an apology and full reckoning around the harvested emails issue and the failure to unsubscribe that made it worse. Please, it would be great if you (and anyone reading this!) could read it and email me at repairs@fightforthefuture.org if there’s anything missing.
Somebody who followed this whole situation contacted me a couple of days ago and pointed me to the apology, so I got the explanation. What a *mess*! I’m really glad you got this clearned up. I do suspect that the web page might have been missing the disclaimer at the time that I signed up, but that’s not a big deal. The original email was bad judgment,maybe, but not outright spam. The big deal was hammering all of those who did unsubscribe several weeks later. You appear to recognize that and have fixed it. That’s what I wanted.
Now, going from anti-spammer mode to personal mode, you can make up for this by hammering Congress if they even THINK of trying to pass any such damn-fool law again. 😉 Trust me, I will too. I’ve learned the hard way over the past fifteen years that Congress can’t be trusted to pass good laws about the Internet. Too many of them just do not get it about the free flow of information, and how important that is.
Just be careful not to spam when you do it. 😉
It’s a deal! Thanks for understanding, and if you ever catch the slightest whiff of a spam issue from us, please please let us know.